A rickety white mailbox marks the turn into the dirt driveway leading to the Richards’ tan modular home. To the left is a recently plowed field. A makeshift garden, hemmed in by a circle of cinderblocks, struggles to come to fruition in front of the house. The potted plants next to the garden are having more luck, with small tomatoes ripening already and strawberries not far behind. A sign on the back door reads: “We hope you come as friends and leave as family.” Melanie Richards and her husband, Kevin, have been renting the home for a little over a year. They live there with their two children, fourteen-year-old Justin and four-year-old Jade, and Melanie’s mother, Judy.
Dressed in gray slacks and a hot pink top, Melanie sits straight-backed on the couch, her green eyes offset by her rosy cheeks and bright shirt. A strand of light brown hair has escaped from the plastic clip holding her hair back; as she tucks it behind her ear, Melanie reflects on how rural the area is. Her neighbors on the right have “been there since they were born,” she says. She has gradually gotten used to hearing the sound of gun shots piercing the weekend silence. She thinks there’s a local gun club that takes advantage of the isolated setting to get in some target practice on Saturdays.
Melanie’s family can’t really afford to move someplace else, so she tries to make light of it. “Like I said, if there were to be an invasion we’d be A-Okay. It doesn’t bother me too terribly bad. My son thinks it’s just awesome.” For Melanie, the most important thing is that she feels safe. They know their neighbors.1
Their modest house accommodates all five of them: Melanie, Kevin, the two kids, and Melanie’s mother, Judy. Judy moved in with them a decade ago, after a tray fell on her during a waitressing shift and damaged the bones in her hand. She now works as a home health aide. The work doesn’t pay well and the hours are inconsistent, but it’s something.
Things got a lot more difficult about five years ago, when Kevin, still in his thirties, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The disease has affected Kevin’s muscles, moods, and memory. Within the year, he had to cut back on his hours as a delivery truck driver for a supermarket. Not long after, he was forced to quit his job. He still does the odd delivery run when the family desperately needs the extra income, but this is increasingly rare.
Living with a chronic illness has worn Kevin down. His shoulders hunch over and his rounded belly protrudes from his faded T-shirt, making him seem shorter than his actual six feet. Dark circles under his deep-set brown eyes contribute to an overall air of fatigue and resignation. He is prone to bouts of depression and anger. If someone casually asks Kevin how he’s doing, he’s apt to answer, “Oh, good, I guess.” After a pause, he’ll add, “Except for we got a truck that don’t run, a car that don’t run, and I ain’t workin’. So, good if you don’t count that!”
Six months after Kevin received his diagnosis, Melanie found out she was pregnant with Jade. Financially, things were the toughest they’d ever been.
“Since we found out about her is pretty much when we started getting food stamps, since he hasn’t really been able to work since then,” says Melanie matter-of-factly.
Melanie largely supports the family on her paycheck. She earns $21,000 a year as the director of children’s education at a local church. When she describes her daily life, Melanie is clear-headed and practical. It’s a struggle sometimes, but they get by, with God’s help.
“I think we do pretty well with the money we have,” she says. “We have a decent house. We have a crappy car. We’ve had to lose a lot. You have to learn to be humble when you have a disease. We had to let go of both of our vehicles and, you know, we had to give up all of our credit in order to just, just get by. But we get by. We have, you know—the kids have Christmas every year. They have the food they need. . . . We’re very blessed to live in this country and—and have what we have.”
Melanie’s patriotism and faith give her a sense of hope and self-worth.Biblical scripture also orients Melanie’s thinking about food and the body. She believes all God’s creatures are beautiful and that our bodies are gifts from God. But it’s not always easy for Melanie to embody or practice a philosophy of reverence toward her own body.
Melanie would like to lose weight. By clinical standards, she is obese. Like many women, Melanie is unhappy with her body.2 And, like many women, she’s experienced a lot of attention toward her body over her lifetime. She has been ridiculed for her weight ever since she was young.
“In fourth grade, one girl told me that I would be absolutely beautiful if I weren’t so heavy,” she says, staring at the floor as she recalls the painful memory. Melanie was constantly teased for being overweight and always picked last in gym class.
For as long as Melanie can remember, food has been her “weakness,” as she describes it. “You know I could be rigid with everything else, but when it comes to food, that’s probably the one place I just don’t have enough willpower. I grew up in an Italian home. So when we’re lonely, or when we’re bored, or when we want to make everybody happy, we find food. Because food makes us happy.”
Her parents worked a lot when Melanie was young, leaving the kids to be fed by relatives. Melanie remembers her grandmother giving them chocolate cake for breakfast. For snacks, they would eat donuts or heat up frozen burritos and slather them with sour cream. A lot of the food they ate was what she now calls junk food.
Yet from an early age, she also got the message she shouldn’t enjoy food because she was heavy. Her older brother and sister resented having to help care for Melanie and made fun of her weight. Melanie found herself caught in a vicious cycle of self-loathing, restricted eating, overeating, and more self-loathing.3
Melanie also blames her mother for her negative relationship with food. “I had a very bad example,” she begins, taking a deep breath. “She did the Atkins Diet for a while. She binges. Like for months she’ll eat a bunch of junk and she’ll go, ‘Oh I feel terrible. I look like crap. I look so fat. Blah, blah, blah.’ And then she’ll decide that she’s not eating but once a day. Or she’s not eating certain things.”
Her mom has an unhealthy view of her body, according to Melanie. “My mom, to this day, when I take pictures of her [she says], ‘Oh delete me, I look horrible.’ And I’m like, ‘Do you realize—I mean when you say that, do you realize what the children hear? They hear that they should care about that too, because that’s what I grew up thinking. I learned to be just like her, until I got older and realized how negative that opinion is. And how harmful it is to say negative things about yourself.”
But Melanie admits that it’s not just Judy she’s gotten these messages from. It’s all the kids who taunted her in school. Her siblings who teased her. The doctors who have treated her.
“One doctor was so horribly mean,” she remembers, thinking back to her first pregnancy. “He said, ‘You shouldn’t get pregnant when you’re this heavy. It’s like asking a little small Toyota pick-up truck to pull a house.’ He was hateful. He almost indicated that I should not have the baby, because I’m just going to kill it with being too fat.”
In an effort to defend herself from others’ thoughtless comments, Melanie built up a wall around herself. “I guess in my mind it was easier to not talk to people and shut them out,” she says. “Because my feelings were very tender and I was easily wounded. It was much easier just to stay aloof, so they couldn’t hurt me, as opposed to give them a chance, you know?”
But that moment in the doctor’s office stayed with Melanie. She wanted desperately for Justin, her firstborn, to start off on the right foot.
Trying to get things right, Melanie did a lot of reading during her pregnancy, just like Marta Hernández-Boynton. And like Marta, she committed herself to breastfeeding her children.
“I’m a very knowledge-hungry person,” Melanie says with an uncharacteristic hint of pride. “So as soon as you start having a baby you read everything that’s available out there. I was in college at the time, so I had already had some child development classes where they talked about it [breastfeeding]. And so I automatically knew that that was much more beneficial than formula. I honestly wonder if a lot of the obesity that we’re seeing in our children hasn’t come from the fact that bottle feeding was so prevalent for seventy years.”
Melanie speculates that maybe parents who bottle feed are unable to recognize when their children are full and end up overfeeding them. She was determined to avoid being one of those parents. She breastfed both of her kids, because that’s what the experts recommended.4
“Please forgive me, people who bottle feed,” Melanie says, raising one hand to signal that what she is about to say might offend someone but needs to be said anyway. “I mean, like I can’t imagine getting up at night to make a bottle. Like my sister-in-law. I love her. But she’s . . .”
Melanie glances around to see if Kevin is within earshot. “I don’t have the word for it,” she continues in a lowered voice. “I don’t want to say she is less educated, because that sounds really awful. But she just doesn’t seem to care enough.”
Breastfeeding was difficult for Melanie, but now she’s glad she persisted. Having done so gives her a sense of being an extra-caring mother.
One of the reasons people care so much about food is because they see a direct connection between what we eat and how we look. Our physical appearance symbolizes the kind of eater we are, and hence the kind of person we are. Are we a person with willpower? Or are we lazy? Are we committed to health or do we not care?
When people are thin, it’s assumed that they watch their weight and care about their health. But thin people—especially women—shouldn’t be too thin or too vain, and they shouldn’t be too controlling or care too much about food or weight, either.5 On the other hand, fatness—again, particularly for women—is portrayed as a moral and personal failure, as evidence that a person has failed to manage their eating and weight.6
Americans have gotten larger over the last three decades, and as our collective waistlines have expanded, the stigma around fat has intensified.7 In the face of evidence that children have also gotten bigger, attention has turned to their parents. What are they doing wrong?
The message that parents are mostly responsible for their kids’ eating habits and body sizes—and to blame for things like childhood obesity, disordered eating, and poor body image—is widespread.8 Melanie thinks her own upbringing played a big role in her battles with her weight and body image, and she wants better for her children.
“Having grown up always overweight, I have always tried to be careful with my children, making sure that they’re eating properly,” Melanie says. “We’re really careful with how many vegetables we get and that we don’t eat junk.”
Melanie tries to avoid buying snacks, ice cream, or soda. She makes fruits and vegetables a high priority in her family’s diet. Even though they don’t have a lot of money, when they moved into the house last year, she bought a small above-ground swimming pool and playset. She wants the kids to have a fun place to get exercise outside.
Yet Justin is getting chubby. He can’t do a sit-up, and although he isn’t the very slowest kid running the mile in gym class, most of the boys in his class are well ahead of him. And not long ago, Melanie got the news that Jade had gained more weight than she should have.
Sometimes Melanie feels like her past is destined to haunt her. Justin is being teased at school about his weight just like she was. Prompted by other kids’ comments about his body, he recently declared he needs to lose weight.
Melanie is unsure of how to help Justin be healthy, on the one hand, and also maintain his self-esteem, on the other. The self-loathing she’s struggled with all her life is something she earnestly wants to help Justin avoid. She acknowledges that he is “probably not as active as he could be” and wishes he would add more vegetables to his diet, so she tries to convey messages about eating better and being active. At the same time, Melanie feels strongly that just because Justin doesn’t like vegetables or can’t do a sit-up, that “doesn’t define who he is.” “And it doesn’t define what we can do,” she says, stressing the last three words.
Melanie is caught between the widespread belief that there are universal standards for health that everyone should achieve, and her commitment to seeing her child for all of his positive qualities.
She believes that it is important to take care of our bodies, too, because they are gifts from God.
“It’s more of a stewardship, a care of the spaceship God has given us to live in until we die,” she explains. “We should take care of the body that we have, so it’s healthy for as long as possible.”
At the same time, her religious faith emphasizes that a person’s appearance does not define who that person is. Certainly, she doesn’t want Justin to feel ashamed of his body, like she has for much of her life.
Jade’s relationship with her body is also a concern. “I hate that girls think they have to be the thinnest or the lightest,” Melanie reflects. “They don’t realize that most of the pictures they see [in magazines] are of people who are unnaturally thin. We expect a grown woman to look like a twelve-year-old. That’s our image of a healthy woman. And it’s just not appropriate.”
Messages about the ideal female body affected Melanie when she was younger and have stayed with her today. “I should be happy with how I am and how God made me,” she says, “but you pick up magazines everyday or look on the TV everyday and we’re constantly confronted with these images of very thin . . .” she trails off. It’s a topic she is passionate about. So much so, it’s sometimes hard for her to express.
At four, Jade’s round face, long blonde hair, and impish smile garner positive comments. People are always telling her how beautiful she is.9 Melanie tries to temper these comments by emphasizing to Jade that it’s what’s on the inside that counts. She worries about how she’ll handle the pressures about her looks that she’ll inevitably face as she gets older. Melanie wants Jade to know that her body and appearance aren’t all she is.
“I say, ‘Jadie, what makes you beautiful?’ And she says, ‘God makes me beautiful.’ And I say, ‘Well, what is it about you that makes you beautiful?’ ” Melanie recounts. “I’m trying to instill in her that her beauty is the kindness and the caring and the gentleness in her spirit. Those are the things that make people attracted to her. And I hope that’ll have an impact.”
Like many mothers today, Melanie is concerned with maintaining her children’s physical health and psychological well-being. Promoting children’s self-esteem is increasingly understood to be part of the work involved with raising healthy, happy children.10 The expectation to raise both emotionally and physically healthy kids, though, can sometimes put mothers in a double bind, especially when kids’ bodies deviate from the norm. If a child starts to get heavy, does Mom say something? Is it dangerous or unhealthy to put too much emphasis on a child’s weight? As Melanie does, many mothers try to find a middle ground, avoiding hurtful words and emphasizing to their children that they are unique and valued, regardless of their size.11
When it comes to her own body, however, Melanie hasn’t managed to internalize the belief that all of God’s creation is beautiful. When she talks about her appearance, she is besieged by memories of being ridiculed for her weight and a lifetime of guilt and shame around food.
Looking at photos of her younger self, Melanie can now say that she was beautiful, that she wasn’t as heavy as she imagined. But Melanie has a hard time cutting her adult self any slack. “Too bad I’m not beautiful now,” she says. “I should be happy with how I am, and how God made me.” But she’s not.